The Dance Exchange is hosting INSPIRE, a Youth Internship Program supported by Maryland Multi-cultural Youth Centers. In this six-week summer intensive, participants will gain leadership skills, engage in the community and make art in the local environment. This project is led by Wayles Haynes, the Youth Programs Coordinator and Lead Artist of the Teen Exchange at the Dance Exchange. I am a supporting artist offering workshops in art making, community engagement, video and photography

Photos is this gallery are from day one workshop in developing art making and designing activities for community engagement. Facilitation and photos by Alexis.

Inspire is a young adult internship program involving individual mentoring of participants as they develop skills in community engagement, project management, communications and movement based art-making. This multi-layered project results in various outcomes from personal achievement to facilitating public discourse and art-making around shared spaces and ideas. Participants will learn about the many facets of the Dance Exchange from artistry to administration and develop their own practice in how to engage a community around concept-based making. This will come in three main conduits; personal art-making, mentor observed group work and community engagement. ~

Tool training with Dance Exchange (DX) Company member Shula Strassfeld. She spent two hours working with Anne Kotleba and I working through DX Tool Boxactivities. She focused on one called “Detail: a tool which focuses on drawing movement ideas from concrete physical evidence by observing the immediate environment and by conjuring details of a scene from memory and imagination. Rather than a fixed procedure, Detail is a set of practices for observing, imagining, discerning, and organizing information that can be a rich source for movement.” Shula led us through a series on movement improvs and visualizations to create solo material and material that we fused together. I really enjoyed dancing with Anne! As we have begun to co-facilitate at Dr. Rayner Browne we are developing and sharing some great activities together and this training strengthened this relationship for sure!!